My Favorite Kind of Writing Research

This is only tangentially related to writing, since I’m doing it in preparation for my next story, but it is SO good to play these games again.

A huge part of my early gaming life was taken up by Sierra adventure games. King’s Quest, Space Quest, Willy Beamish, and similar series from other publishers took up more hours of my life than I care to think about these days.

There was always something especially quirky and fun about the humor in Space Quest and the many send-ups of the sci-fi I grew up on that drew me in to those games. The sad part is I never played any of the series after the third. I tried, but many of the games from that era were buggy, and I never got IV, V or VI to run until now.

I’m working through both Space Quest I and IV as research, or “research” if you prefer. Thanks to the magic of ScummVM, I’ve been able to get past the first bit of Space Quest IV for the first time ever. It’s a real delight to have new Sierra games (new to me, at least) to play. There’s still one or two King’s Quest titles I never got through …

I’m not sure exactly at this point what direction I want the Space Quest inspiration to take me in. I’ll probably have to let it decide that. It certainly won’t be a carbon copy, or an attempt to write a story in the Space Quest universe. In my mind’s eye, it’s more a matter of colorings and shadings of humor and weird situations.

Thanks to ScummVM I’m able to finally(!) play the game after all these years, but there are still some issues because it’s such an old game. Wish me luck getting through the whole thing!